have no further authority, it has been maintained, that even this authority is an infringement on the rights of freemen; that the Church should have no bond of faith; should profess no system of belief; but that every member should have the right of communion with the body of Christ and also of believing and propagating, under its authority, and with its influence, whatever sentiments he should see fit.

Constantine on taking to himself the office of a priest out of the Church, and in a most important sense, over the Church, immediately gave a taste of the character of his influence, and made it evident that such influence from the state over the Church, was dangerous. He was ignorant of the immense, the vital importance of the question to be decided by the council of Nice. Heretics have ever made it their first point, to veil their sentiments in artful and plausible phraseology, which, to an inexperienced mind, would seem to be nothing but the great truths themselves, which it designed to overthrow. When we hear men earnestly contending for, and zealously endeavoring to propagate, opinions which they confess make but a slight alteration in long received doctrines; particularly when we hear them ridiculing, and charging with the most abominable consequences, the old doctrines, and yet professing, in the same breath, that their new ones are the same in meaning and differ only in terms; that the disputes relate only to "terminology" we may be assured that these persons are dangerous heretics. Arius had taught that Christ was a creature, created by the Father out of nothing, and yet he had the skill to conceal his sentiments so artfully, and to adopt language so nearly resembling that of the orthodox, that he persuaded great numbers that there was no important innovation in doctrine taking place in the church; there was great danger that he would have further time to sow his tares of heresy, and, by persuading the pastors to sleep on, that the crop would have time to choke and destroy the truth. Constantine was seduced by their plausible expressions, though later in life, he was friendly to the heresy itself. In his letter to Alexander and Arius, he says, "that the controversy was one, about which no canon or ecclesiastical law prescribed any thing; that the Scriptures did not give them a handle for this controversy; that there was no new error introduced about religion; but that they all held the same sentiment concerning the faith-that it was not right that a whole people

should be thrown into dissension about such trivial matters! The emperor used his mighty influence to produce, what he called, peaee; that the church might not be divided; that questions on trivial subjects, should not destroy Christian fellowship: that is, that the whole Church should give her sanction to the opinion, that the doctrine of the Trinity, and the proper divinity of Christ, is a mere trivial question; he appealed to the feelings of humanity in the breast of the orthodox bishops, as though these men would be influenced by their feelings, to decide that a man might innocently teach that their Saviour was only a creature; he made the same appeals which the advocates of heresy are now making to the feelings of the orthodox, that they should declare that it is a slight error to give up the doctrines of original sin and of divine efficiency in regeneration and sanctification. But those assembled pastors, who doubtless knew as well as the Emperor or the Arians, the importance of peace and unity, knew also the importance of truth and the real unity of faith; and they dared not, for the sake of an apparent or pretended unity of faith or of feeling, to give their sanction to the doctrine, that it is a trifling error for one to deny the Lord who bought him. Had the pastors listened to the emperor it would have only been giving their public sanction to the innocence of the Arian heresy.

But the influence of the civil authority in adding penalties strictly temporal to the decisions of the Council of Nice, was hardly less inauspicious to the well being of the Church than to attempt to prevent ecclesiastical action on it altogether. To suppress inquiry, and to punish error with the civil arm, are alike foreign to the true principles of toleration. If an ecclesiastical body, whose constitution prescribes the qualification of its members, have no right to decide this question, or even sit in judgment on it; if they are to be told that it is of no importance whether nominal members have the coustitutional qualifications, then there is an end of ecclesiastical liberty: but if this power is to be taken away by the civil authority, then the civil power has annihilated the most important right which that power is engaged to protect. The constitution of the ecclesiastical body is destroyed by the civil power. It would have been well if the Bishops had opposed the influence of Constantine in the one case, with the same enlightened firmness that they did in the other. But the principle here first introduced among christians, and

maintained in the church for so many centuries, was to have time to develope its evil consequences and to give demonstration of its evil tendency for ages; and perhaps there is scarce any truth better established in Protestant Countries, than this that ecclesiastical offences should be visited only by strictly ecclesiastical punishment. But we must take our leave of Constantine for the present number of this work.

ART. VII. LETTERS TO A SOUTHERNER.

DEAR SIR:

LETTER VIII.

You may have wondered that I have spent no more time in shewing that the New Haven theology is contrary to the evangelical system of doctrines as generally professed in the Protestant Church, and also to the formulas of doctrine which the divines of the New School profess to believe, and solemnly engage to teach, whether in the pulpit or professor's chair. This enquiry I shall now attempt to answer.

That the doctrines of the New School are heresy, I have supposed too obvious to be questioned by any who have not embraced them. I have therefore confined myself to the labor of shewing them to be a system of dangerous philosophy. They who deny the doctrine of native depravity also deny the doctrine of regeneration, and sanctification by the Holy Spirit. This has been the case in all ages of the church. How can they who deny the existence not only of total depravity in man himself, but the possibility of any depravity in him; who place all real sinfulness in acts, how can it be supposed that they can believe that man himself is created unto good works? The truth is, these men ridicule and blaspheme the doctrines, which the Protestant Church has embraced in her creeds and confessions of faith, on the subjects of native depravity and regeneration. They endeavor to cast odium upon them, under the terms of physical depravity and physical regeneration, and charge them with consequences which Socinians and infidels are too prudent often to attempt to fix upon them, in a public manner. Who supposes, that a school in theology who teach that God does all in his power to prevent

sin, can really believe the doctrine that he decrees the existence of human actions? Who that believes that God does all in his power to convert both the elect and those who are lost, can really believe the doctrine of election, as expressed in the creeds and confessions of faith which prevail in this country. It has not been the principal or the leading object with me in these letters to prove that the New Haven theology, as it is called, is heresy-(which is evident on the very face of it)-I am confident that it is infidelity. I regard it as a scheme of philosophical principles, drawn from human reason, at variance indeed with the doctrines of the gospel, but more especially at variance with the law of God; which confounds the distinction between holiness and sin; which wholly annihilates this law and all the spiritual precepts of the Bible, which are its substance.

I attempted to shew that this system begins by sinking the authority of the word of God, down to a level with that of human reason. This doctrine is boldly maintained in several articles in the Christian Spectator, and is found announced with more or less distinctness, in most of the writings of that school in theology. In Ch. Spec. Vol. 9. No. 1. is an article which has this title "on the authority of reason in theology." Here the writer boldly states the doctrine, that a man may place the same reliance on his own reason as on the word of God on the subjects treated on in the holy scriptures. On the first page he says "it will be our object in the present article to establish and defend the following proposition, viz: that the clear, unperverted deductions of reason are as binding in their authority, and not less truly to be relied on, than the word of God." The writer of this article, and several other writers in the Christian Spectator, even take for granted, that a man can know when his reason is unperverted, and also that this pure reason can decide, and may decide on points already determined by the Bible. Supposing there were real sincerity in thus acknowledging the authority of the Bible, there would be something absurd in defending the importance and competency of a new tribunal to determine questions already settled by another. What would be thought of a civil constitution which should establish a new court to examine questions upon which another had power to give a final decision and which had even done it. But a writer who has in several articles discussed this subject in Vol. 3d. of the Ch. Spec. gives an example of the

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manner in which reason is to decide on doctrines discussed in the Bible. He brings the doctrine of native depravity, which the Protestant Church has always drawn from the word of God, and considered at the foundation of the evangelical system, before the tribunal of reason and there determines that it is false, and then refers the matter to the Bible with a very respectful deference. We have seen then that common sense is competent to decide whether the nature of man is itself sinful or whether all sin consists in voluntary action" "It is then, plainly the decision of competent unperverted common sense, that the doctrine of physical depravity is false and that all sin consists in voluntary action. The latter then is the truth." Having determined this by common sense, in the very next sentence he pays a very handsome compliment to the Bible. Having said, "The latter then is the truth" he instantly adds, "We now proceed to ascertain the decision of the Bible on this subject." Ch. Spec. Vol. 3. p. 465. A very difficult enquiry to one who had begun with the position that the decisions of common sense were infallible truth, and that the Bible could teach nothing contrary to it, and who had already obtained the infallible verdict of common sense. Paine or Hume or Voltaire, could not set the authority of reason higher than this writer had done, though they might not have thought of paying so civil a compliment to the Bible.

You will please to observe, that common sense must always first decide what is true or false on any subject, and then, with all deference and reverence, apply to the word of Jehovah (which can teach nothing contrary to it), and see if the same thing be not true or false by that.

I shall give a few additional proofs that these writers hold to the plenary INFALLIBILITY of what they are pleased to call unperverted, competent common sense: and that the profession of giving an equal authority to the word of God, is utterly insincere and false; that they actually give it no more authority over the human mind than Hume or Thomas Paine would have been willing to allow it.

First then I say, they teach that man, by his own reason, is competent to decide what the word of God CAN or CANNOT teach on a given subject; that having determined these important questions, he is to find out what it actually does teach by the regular laws of interpretation. Hear one of their writers "Those who think alike and correctly respect.